


let me weep for all the things we've lost

by TheQueenWillRuleTheBoard



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, Post-Book 2: Crooked Kingdom, inej returns to ketterdam, maybe its self-indulgent maybe its being the change you want to see in the world, otherwise known as 'is physical intimacy as important as verbal intimacy'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:55:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26425999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheQueenWillRuleTheBoard/pseuds/TheQueenWillRuleTheBoard
Summary: It’s an accident, Inej thinks, when he tells her. Judging by the faint pitch, hummed on the exhale of a breath, his consciousness is far away – like he’s winding down a road somewhere along a long-lost dream.“Rietveld,” he whispers, with the faintest flutter of his dark eyelashes against his cheeks.
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Comments: 10
Kudos: 175





	let me weep for all the things we've lost

**Author's Note:**

> Kaz and Inej will not leave my brain, so here they are in print. Here I imagine this is far from the first time Inej has come back to Ketterdam at the end of CK, and they've built up their comfort level since then.

_**i.**_ INEJ

It’s an accident, Inej thinks, when he tells her. Judging by the faint pitch, hummed on the exhale of a breath, his consciousness is far away – like he’s winding down a road somewhere along a long-lost dream.

She’d been watching him, the way she does when she can’t relax, finding comfort in the familiar planes of his face. Idly, she wonders if she looks long and hard enough, might she catch a glimpse of what Kaz had been when he was small? Surely, he couldn’t have always been this sharp-angled, brooding thing. Everyone was a child once.

_The Barrel is the womb I crawled out of,_ his voice snarls in her head. _It’s where I was born._

It has been years since he last said it to her directly, but he repeats something of the sort anytime someone questions his parentage, his origin, or his character. He maintains the persona well, _The Bastard of the Barrel_ , even in front of the girl who became his shadow. Still, Inej always strains not to roll her eyes. She can barely contain it now, even as he sleeps.

“Rietveld,” he whispers, with the faintest flutter of his dark eyelashes against his cheeks.

She freezes, pulling her eyes away from the roughly inked spot on his arm that her fingers had been trailing. Kaz doesn’t elaborate, his breath maintaining its slow and steady rhythm, but Inej can feel them teetering on the brink of something important. A secret. “Hm?” she asks, cautiously.

A few moments pass, where he seems to rouse himself from the depths of slumber. As she waits, breath caught in her throat, Inej focuses on a little piece of hair she aches to comb away from his forehead. _Tell me,_ she prays. _Let me in._

“Rietveld,” he repeats finally, the rasp of his voice clearer than before. “That’s what it stands for.”

She looks back down at her fingers, hovering above the black ‘R’ contrasted against his pale skin. A memory tugs at her, stirring in the back of her mind. The faint ringing of a bell, the echo of Kaz’s voice, a scribble on the bottom of a legal document. “Oh,” she realizes, “The farmer.”

The corner of his mouth quirks upward, though with his eyes closed she dares not guess between a smile or a grimace. Knowing him, it’s probably a bit of both. His voice drops off again, lost in the furrow of his brow. “It’s Jordie’s.”

Inej gets the feeling that at long last he’s given her a key, a combination to a lock long since forgotten. The answer unravels before her: _Rietveld. Jordie’s. Jordan Rietveld, who owns a farm._ “Jordie’s,” she says slowly, like a revelation. Like a prayer.

“And…” he takes a breath, steeling his tongue to form the words. “And mine.”

“Kaz,” she exhales, inching her forehead toward his.

He doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t expect him to. In moments like this, when he’s clearly overwhelmed, she can feel his throat tack up as though he’s swallowed molasses. It used to feel like an insult, that he’d squeeze some white-hot truth out of himself, just to clamp down around it and shut her out. Now, she knows, he’s learning. It isn’t about her – no matter how badly it stings.

In the wake of his silence, she works through the narrative on her own, piecing together the bits of Kaz she’d collected over the years into the the confession he’s making.

_I was born in the Barrel._

Inej had never fully discerned between the truth and the myth of _Dirtyhands_ , and admittedly that part had seemed like a dramatization. How many times had she rolled her eyes behind his back? It begins to dawn on her, what he really meant. Why he’d said it with such fervor, such contempt for all these years. An image creeps into her mind: two boys – the _Rietveld_ boys – who’d lost everything, undone by foolishness and the fever, tossed onto the reaper’s barge. Just two more lost souls in a pile of bodies. One boy who crawled out, who made it back.

Returned, as though from the grave.

_The Barrel is the womb I crawled out of._

Born again, as Kaz Brekker. A monstrous shadow of a boy who had died, who took all his goodness with him.

A lurch passes through Inej’s stomach, leaping its way into her throat. The world spins at full tilt, and tears spring into her eyes, unbidden. She pushes against them, knowing Kaz has no desire or patience for her sympathy. Hoping that he’ll keep his eyes shut, that he won’t catch her, she resolves herself to carry on alone. Inches apart and miles away from the one she loves the most, just like always.

The shake in her breath betrays her, and his eyes crack open, bleary and dark as well-watered soil. “Inej,” he warns quietly.

_No mourners,_ she reminds herself. _No funerals._

Only, something inside her has cracked, and she can’t stave off the rush of hot, bubbling anguish flooding her body. _Bullshit,_ her mind roars, amidst the chaos. They deserved better. He would never admit it, and she knew it, or else he would dissolve, but Jordie Rietveld and his little brother had deserved a proper burial. Even two destitute boys curled together in the dark deserved a place to rest. They deserved someone to cry over them, to miss them. May Inej herself be damned, because though there hadn’t been anyone to mourn them that day, there will be someone tonight. She won’t wail or scream or fuss, but she will not hide. She meets Kaz’s gaze, unwavering, even as the tears slip down her cheeks quieter than she slips across rooftops.

He sighs, somewhere between frustration and resignation. She can imagine how he might have liked this to go – a quiet admission, one she tucked into her ledger of secrets as it fell between them like a wave sinking into beach sand. Kaz’s eyes rove over her uncomfortably, and he lifts his arm from beneath her fingers to push back the piece of hair that had fallen into his face. “It’s just a name,” he says, with an edge to his voice, a habitual threat.

Inej watches him pave a brick back into the wall he’d been beginning to dismantle. A silent fury burns in her heart, within the part of her that wants to weep. She will not let him do this to her, not tonight. Always, she treads lightly, tiptoeing around to accommodate his feelings and his habits and his rules. But in this moment, she feels a shift beneath her ribcage. _Without armor,_ she thinks. _That means my armor, too._ Her instinct, as a former indentured captive, is to bow her head and survive. Weather out the storm until she can slip away unseen.

He will see her tonight, as she sees him.

“No,” she says, eyes shining. “It’s _you._ ”

Kaz’s gaze flashes back to hers, widened as though she’d slapped him.

She can imagine now, what they must have looked like when he was small. Soft, not yet sharpened by the cruelty of time. It crashes around her ears, the water in which he’d drowned – in which he still drowned, if she drew too close. She can finally see him in the tumult of his irises, curtained by his long, boyish eyelashes. She can visualize the boy with wide eyes and an open smile to match, holding his beloved brother’s hand as they navigated Ketterdam after a childhood on the farm.

Whenever she’d pictured Kaz, he’d looked not unlike the boy she’d pleaded to that night at the Menagerie: hidden in shadow, impervious and unyielding. How many nights had they spent perched like crows in the dark, harboring against the dawn? Inej hadn’t minded. The sun had been part of her Before, a chapter full of wild geraniums and bright dreams, before the slavers had taken her. Picturing now what the boy Kaz must have been, it occurs to her that she hadn’t known what Kaz Brekker was in the Before. What his Before could even have looked like. She’d always been missing a piece. _Kaz Rietveld,_ her mind chants, as she peels away the layers of Brekker he’d adhered to himself. _Kaz Rietveld Kaz Rietveld Kaz Rietveld._

Behind him, the sun blossoms.

“Kaz,” she tries. Reaching up, she lays the pads of her fingers on his cheeks in the ghost of a touch. He’s frozen, trapped with an expression of terror on his face. She raises her chin, angling her face as though to nestle it against his, and says with the most reverent conviction she can muster: “Kaz Rietveld.”

The sound washes over him, and he shudders. He presses his eyes closed, cracking open beneath her fingers. With her thumb, Inej draws a line across the sharp cut of his cheekbone. A mangled noise escapes his throat, what she could only describe as a whimper.

“Look at me,” she croons. In response, he curls his knees closer to his center and faintly shakes his head. Inej worms her way into his space, carefully slipping her leg between his, buffered between their pajamas. He stills again, his breath halting in his chest.

“Without armor, remember?”

Slowly, minutely, he nods.

“Then look at me, Kaz.”

_**ii.**_ KAZ

He can’t. Absolutely cannot look at her. He will burst, break into a million pieces, and never put himself back together. He can’t do it, not when she’s looking at him like that –like she’s solved a puzzle, like she’s never laid eyes on him before tonight.

It had been a mistake. An accident. He’d said it before he could think better of it, oddly moved by the sensation of her fingertips brushing across his tattoo. It had triggered the barest instinct in him, the part of him that longs to give her whatever she wants, whatever she deserves. _Everything, everything, everything_. And it had slipped, right between his teeth.

Hearing his name echoed in her voice had stripped him bare. It’s always been her voice that pulls him back into his body and brings him back to his senses. She sounds like what hot chocolate tastes like, a warm comfort emanating from the inside out. It soothes him, reminding him of how it felt to have a brother’s side to tuck into.

And when he opens his eyes, he knows what expression he’ll find laid across her face. One that says he is worth being, worth caring for, worth returning to. It’s a lie and a sham and he absolutely should not have told her, because it will convince her to believe in a promise he cannot make. Even if he could, even if he could thaw and grieve the way he swore never to do again, he knows he'd be ripping himself open at the seams, all for a woman who will leave him again when the sun breaches the horizon. He wonders how many times she’ll come back – how many times she can take being disappointed in him, before she stops coming back at all.

A sweat breaks out on his brow when he feels the press of her knees against his thighs, one of her ankles hooked around his calf. _It’s Inej,_ he says, over and over in his head, refusing to drown. _She’s here. She’s alive. Warm and alive_.

_For how long?_ the demon in his head laughs, the one that hatched from Kaz’ one and only comfort becoming his worst nightmare. _How long until she’s cold and dead?_

“Without armor, remember?” she asks, the reassuring melody of his lovely Inej.

Kaz has never wanted anything more in his life, to bend and bow and scrape, to break open and give her everything she wants. She could feed on his innards and drink his blood and still he’d cry _more Inej, you deserve more._ He can’t do it, not yet. Maybe not ever. But he nods anyway. He will try.

“Then look at me, Kaz.”

He does.

Inej’s eyes are sparkling with tears, her mouth set into a defiant line. Kaz takes in the sight of her more thoroughly, noticing her hair making its best efforts to escape its loose sleep braid, her shirt twisting up around her torso, her arm bracketing him with her fingers hovering above his cheek. Woven into the lines of her face, however, he catches fury. Wracking his brain, he tries to work out what he’s done to elicit that.

“Inej?”

A shock ripples through him when she sniffles. Nobody had taught him what to do with a crying woman. Or rather, how to assuage one.

“What?” she says, in what he imagines is supposed to be a defensive growl, but the pout on her lips really undercuts the effect.

He heaves a sigh, mostly to prevent himself from laughing at how cute she looks, puffed up indignantly against him. “Why are you crying?”

“ _Because_ ,” she huffs, curling her shoulders into her chest.

Kaz waits, allowing her time to finish her sentence, unprompted. But something in him eases, recognizing a habit in this part of Inej’s game. He tells her, “Spit it out, Wraith,” a tease on his tongue.

“I am crying because somebody should, Kaz,” she proclaims. “The Saints know you won’t do it. But I will – I am.”

She’s holding out on him, hiding something, but he can’t quite discern what. “I can see that,” he says.

After a moment, she weaves one of her hands into the fabric of his shirt, twisting it between her forefinger and thumb – chewing on what’s bothering her. “I don’t care what you think,” she says finally.

Kaz frowns, utterly confused. “What I think about what?”

“Mourners.” Inej meets his eyes, and a jolt of ice strikes his chest. This is the expression he had been afraid of. The one that says she’s making a man of him where there’s nothing but a hole. “I’m mourning for you. And Jordie,” she amends softly.

A scoff escapes past his teeth and he shakes his head, ready to stop this in its tracks before it gets out of hand. “I didn’t ask––“

“And don’t tell me not to, Kaz! Don’t tell me it’s not worth it, and that I’m wasting my time, and not to care about you, because I am not listening, do you understand me?” Before he can even conceive a response, she launches off into a fierce momentum. “I am not a shadow anymore, and I will not sit back and pretend not to be bothered by your wounds––”

“ _Bothered_ by my wounds?” he bites, because he cannot take it, because people beyond saving have no capacity for receiving pity.

“ _Yes!_ ” she spits back, and in spite of himself, he thinks about how he’d fall in love with her more and more every time she sliced him with her teeth. “The way you are bothered by mine! The way you would come for me, no matter how broken we were! The way we fight our way out!”

Kaz can’t think, he can’t breathe, overwhelmed by how thick Inej’s voice sounds, unabashed and imploring.

_Because,_ says a little voice that he doesn’t recognize, _what she’s saying makes sense._

What wouldn’t he do, if Inej were in pain? He’d schemed and bartered and killed to provide her a life worth living, to keep her from harm. It does bother him, of course, what she went through at the Menagerie. He stops his imagination at the blank look in her eyes, swathed in false silks, before he wants to burn the place to the ground. But if he turns it on its head, is that how it must be, to imagine the reaper’s barge? To imagine what it took to survive it?

He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to calm the maelstrom blowing through his brain. If only he could catch a breath.

She murmurs near his ear, and it’s perhaps the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard. “Kaz, how many times do I have to bleed for you until you notice it’s voluntary?”

Collapsing into a broken, deranged laugh, he finds himself curving his body into Inej, his forehead pressing against her shoulder. Her fingers rake through his hair, and he shivers.

“Do you want me to stop?” she asks gently.

Kaz shakes his head, but a lump of dread climbs his throat. He knows what he needs to ask, but knowing and doing are two very different things. So he stops to breathe, absorbing the feeling of Inej’s warmth against his body. Against his better judgement, he allows her to console him.

He doesn’t know if he can do this. But he will try. “Inej?”

“Hm?”

The words he wants to say catch in his throat, so he stalls for time. “Please, my darling Inej, treasure of my heart…”

She scoffs, and he can feel the roll of her eyes without seeing it. “What, Kaz?”

“How do I give it to you? How do I let you cut me open and take what you want, knowing you won’t be there to keep it when I wake up?”

Her fingers still where she’s tangled them in his hair. Kaz swallows the bile that wants to escape, horrified by what he’d just admitted to her.

“You have to trust me,” Inej says. “Trust me to come back for you.”

“Oh, is that all?”

She laughs, a bright twinkling sound, and a tiny weight in his chest lifts. “Let’s have breakfast, somewhere nice,” she hums into his hair. “And then you can come see me off? We could do a proper goodbye this time and everything.”

It’s not a promise to stay, and for that he’s grateful. Inej isn’t in the business of making false promises any more than he is. All he needs in order to sleep tonight is the knowledge that he won’t grasp at empty sheets in the morning, wondering if he dreamed her up out of nothing.

_**iii.**_ INEJ

Kaz Brekker looks beautiful in the sunlight, she decides. Whether its rumpled in his sheets under daybreak, across the table at a bistro while he sips his coffee, or in full relief on berth twenty-two, Inej can’t seem to get enough of it.

She releases the notion she’d had, that it was contained to the unburdened moments of the past. How silly she’d been, when really, dawn comes around every morning. It belongs to them, for as many mornings as they’d wake up to in this lifetime, together or apart.

“Inej,” he calls, slipping his hand into hers right as she’s about to climb on board _The Wraith_. Squeezing back, she turns to face him. He raises his other hand to brace against her cheek, and the cold tip of his crow’s head cane against her skin nearly distracts her from noticing the barest kiss he leaves against her mouth. “Come back safely,” he murmurs, her favorite sound of stone on stone. “Please.”

She nods, barely able to contain her grin. “Goodbye, Kaz.”

“Goodbye, Inej.”

She doesn’t look back once she lands on deck – she knows he’s already making his way back up the harbor, but she’s not bothered. They’ll see each other soon enough.


End file.
